CHAPTER 6

Cancer Cell No. 1 in the Free Body Politic

To thine own self be true,And it must follow as the
night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.-- Shakespeare,
Hamlet.

The Soviet leaders have also appeared in the role of the most uncompromising
defenders of national sovereignty known to modern times ** The defense of
national sovereignty, far from contradicting the goal of a Soviet world state,
has actually become one of the most formidable weapons in the struggle for its
attainment. ** Soviet pre-occupation with construction and indefinite expansion
of an all-powerful, all-embracing state authority, while originally justified as
a necessary, transitory means, has instead become the indestructible,
unwithering end of Soviet society. -- Elliot R. Goodman, The Soviet
Design for a World State.1

A far greater danger to freedom than the Russian and Chinese dictatorships
lies here at home. It is as invisible as cancer cell No. 1, and as virulent. Yet
it remains as protected by tabu, as worshiped as any Baal or Moloch ever was --
and capable of causing, and even inspiring, much more human sacrifice. What is
it? A concept of national sovereignty that is demonstrably false to the
fundamental nature of all the free peoples whom it now confuses, deceives and
betrays. It is true only to the nature of dictatorship, whether Communist
National Socialist or Fascist, which alone it serves.

What is evil in one body politic may be good in another, much as what is
poison to one species feeds another. To Communism our current concept of
national sovereignty is natural and nourishing -- as vital as is venom to a
viper. Only to the free is it fatal.

The Current Concept of National Sovereignty

This concept, which the free now share with the dictatorships, makes the
nation supreme, above all law. It holds the nation's absolute independence to be
the highest good. It calls on the people to sacrifice their individual liberties
and lives to maintain their nation's freedom to do as it pleases, insofar as
other nations are concerned. In the Congress of the United States, as in Cuba
and the Congo, this concept inflames fiery opposition to the "surrender"
of an iota of the nation's "right" to be a law unto itself, even where
this "sacrifice" would clearly extend the rights of the citizen, or
secure him against needless sacrifice of his or her liberty and life.

This concept of national sovereignty is, of course, part and parcel of the
ancient dogma that man is made for the State. We have seen how it was once
embodied in "divine right" sovereigns. Since they claimed absolute
power over their own people, these autocrats naturally had to be, in their
relations with each other, no less sovereign, no less a law each unto himself.
And since the Communist dictatorships are much more totalitarian than the Czars
in their enslavement of their people to the authority of the State, it is all
too natural that they should continue to uphold between nations the same concept
of sovereignty as did the Czars. They are true to themselves, inside and out, in
their adherence to it.

Not so the other nations, which have overthrown this concept of sovereignty
at home, yet still permit it to rule all their foreign relations. It is most
alien to the peoples who have led the revolution against such absolutism,
reversed at home the dogma that man is made for the State and replaced their
unlimited Kings with themselves as the sovereign people. To these peoples, the
concept of national sovereignty which they apply to one another is as unnatural
a growth in the body politic as is cancer in the human body. It is a disease as
malignant and fatal ... a far more widespread cause of suffering and grief to
their citizens than cancer ... a more massive killer even than the H-bomb, which
is but one of the myriad ways of destroying men that it now commands.

True Democratic Concept of Sovereignty

One cannot too often repeat that the concept of national sovereignty that is
true to the nature of a free people holds that: (1) The State is made of, by and
for man; (2) the nation's sovereignty resides in its citizens equally, (3) they
delegate a part of their sovereignty to the national government, and other parts
to their state, county and municipal governments; (4) they reserve to themselves
the remainder, including the right to re-delegate any of it (except the right to
delegate and re-delegate) when and as they please, provided this is done by Law
that they have consented to; (5) the purpose for which they delegate any of it
to any government is always and only to preserve and advance equally the
individual sovereignty of the citizens -- his or her life, liberty and power to
pursue happiness as he or she pleases (always under the Rule of Law which these
sovereigns have freely constituted).

This democratic concept of sovereignty is opposed to the totalitarian
concept no less completely in other respects. It admits of no absolute,
unlimited sovereignty even in its sovereigns-to say nothing of the bodies
politic they together create. It leaves no sovereign citizen a law unto himself;
holds no man or institution above the Law. Although its sovereign citizens never
alienate their sovereignty, they always agree to limit even their own exercise
of it. Such limitation is inherent in their acceptance of the establishment of
their constitution by some degree of majority vote, and in their elimination,
practically, of the right of veto that is theoretically inherent in sovereignty.

Kings who maintained an absolute veto over their own people could reason
that such sovereignty required them to insist on an unlimited veto in their
affairs with other kings who claimed equal sovereignty. Such sovereigns could
fancy it to be practical, or possible, to get this claim admitted. The great are
subject, as Descartes said, to great aberrations.

Common men have more common sense. Enough at any rate to realize that there
is a vital difference between their sovereignty and that of autocrats.

Such kings could hope to survive amid the anarchy their sovereign claims
created. For they could send their subjects to get killed for them -- "for
King and Country" -- in the wars to which their concept of sovereignty
inevitably led, and leads. But when each citizen is sovereign, none can hope
thus to escape. Each sovereign then has his own life directly at stake. In such
circumstances most men readily understand that life is not possible if each
citizen sovereign claims that his sovereignty must be as unlimited in relation
to his fellow sovereigns as is his rule over his own body.

And so men, in making themselves each sovereign in their own nation, never
lay claim to such attributes of sovereignty as having a veto, and being above
the law. They readily accept the Rule of Law as made by a freely formed majority
of them, so long as the law and the majority are also limited by enough
individual liberty to keep each citizen reasonably sovereign. For the democratic
concept of sovereignty, which always makes all citizens subject to the Law, also
makes the law always subject to the will of the citizens. Its Law is not
absolute, as was the law of the Medes and the Persians "which altereth not"
-- even at the instance of Darius, as he found when, against his own will, his
own law forced him to throw Daniel into the den of lions.

The democratic concept of sovereignty also keeps the citizen reasonably
sovereign in other ways. For example, by having the principal representatives to
whom he delegates part of his sovereignty elected by equal vote of the citizens
and periodically responsible to them, and by establishing a Bill of Rights and
judicial machinery, to assure that the sovereign powers which the citizens
reserve to themselves are not infringed by their representatives, or by their
fellow citizens.

Perhaps the most significant proof of the sovereignty of the citizens in any
nation is the degree to which it leaves the individual free to follow his
conscience -- where conscience is not a subterfuge -- as in refusing to obey
draft laws that require him to kill other men, or otherwise violate what to his
conscience is a moral Law, superior to any law made by men. In last analysis,
the sovereignty of the citizen, as we have seen, is founded on the idea that the
most sacred thing in every man is the spark of God within him. The absolutist
concept holds the state sacred, deifies the nation, and denies -- today -- even
the soul's existence. Freedom's concept of sovereignty holds nothing human
sacred except the life, liberty and dignity of the individual, and recognizes in
him no unlimited divine right -- except that of his conscience. There could be
no sharper, deeper, soul-revealing contrast than that between the concept of
sovereignty we uphold at home and the one we uphold abroad.

The Cancerous Concept That Endangers Freedom

Would you not agree that the concept of sovereignty set forth in the
preceding section is the true democratic one? Must you not also agree that in
our foreign relations we reverse this concept -- even when we deal with other
peoples whose bodies politic were created by it, too? Must you not further agree
that the principle of national sovereignty we and they apply to one another is
part and parcel of the absolutist dogma from which we and they recoil with
instinctive horror when embodied in a Hitler, a Stalin? Why do we not recoil at
its presence in ourselves? The reason is that we have not yet seen it there. And
so this cancer has become the deadliest danger we now face, and the hardest one
to extirpate.

To take half a loaf is usually better than to take none, but to take out
only half a cancer is better only if one seeks to kill the victim in the
cruellest way.

To understand how much more dangerous this invisible cancer in us is than
the dictatorships whose massive arms we see so well, let us suppose that we
remove their armaments, and even them, but not the cancer in us. To thwart thus
their aim of "burying us" would be far more dangerous now than this
operation proved to be in World War I and II. But let us assume that it succeeds
once again (in the sense of removing the dictatorship) -- and that we survive.
Even so, past experience proves it only too probable that we would soon
thereafter face the totalitarian threat in even more fearful form.

World War I removed the Kaiser type of autocrat completely; none of the
deeply-rooted hereditary despots of Europe remained. The Romanoff, Hapsburg,
Hohenzollern and Ottoman dynasties went down for good. The world lay as never
before in the hands of the most democratic powers. But the war left their
relations with one another governed by the concept of unlimited national
sovereignty. Soon absolutism, in the more virulent form of Hitler's National
Socialism, regained control of Germany.

To remove the Nazis proved much more dangerous than to remove Kaiser, Czar
and Sultan. Again the only thing removed was the monstrous visible growth, not
the hidden cancerous concept in the free bodies politic. Result: Now again we
face a still more formidable form of dictatorship. Communism is more
aggressively armed than were the Kaiser and the Fuehrer; it holds a stronger
defensive position, and it can win by other means than war, -- by economic
warfare, by depression, by subversion ... and by the cancerous concept of
national sovereignty that still devours our vitals.

How and Why Communism Champions National Sovereignty

The Russian dictatorship has been the most ardent and extreme champion of
national sovereignty since World War II. As E. A. Korovin pointed out, as early
as 1924, in page 43 of the textbook on international law he published then in
Moscow:

"At a time when the general development of European international law
moves in the direction of draining sovereignty of its content in the name of
contemporary interdependence of states ... the Soviet government is recognized
as the champion of the doctrine of 'classical' sovereignty."

Moscow champions it not to keep the world divided forever into many
sovereign nations, but to advance its ultimate goal -- the universal Communist
State that Marx and Lenin dreamed of. In that world there would be only one
sovereign nation in today's diplomatic sense, nor would there be, within that
Communist State, any sovereign states in the sense in which they are called "sovereign"
in such federal unions as the United States and Switzerland. The world state
that Marx and Lenin envisioned is fantastically centralized, not federalized.
Lenin especially attacked federalism. True the problem of nationalities in
Russia forced a little federation on him, and the present Soviet Constitution
states that "the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a federal state."
But when these concessions were first made, Lenin himself explained on March 28,
1918 that: "Federation is only a transitional step ... The federation we
are now introducing and which will develop in future, will serve as the surest
step to the most solid unification of the different nationalities of Russia into
a unitary, democratic, centralized Soviet state."

This policy has continued.2 As it
has evolved in Russia, Communism has not only discarded the eventual "withering
away" of the state into a "stateless" world, envisioned in its
early theory, but has developed to an incredible degree Marx's highly
centralized idea of the final world state. It plans a world dictatorship in
which all power on the planet would be centered. Such is the appalling
apotheosis of the principle from which our current doctrine of national
sovereignty springs. To bring it about, the Soviet leaders have become -- to
quote Dr. Goodman again -- "the most uncompromising defenders of national
sovereignty in modern times." He continues:

There are three basic reasons which would seem to account for this urgent
Soviet defense of national sovereignty. The first is to perpetuate the anarchy
of the nation-state system in the non-Soviet world. The Soviet leaders are aware
of the fact that they would have much to lose and the non-Soviet world much to
gain if that anarchic system were overhauled and strengthened ... Since the
second World War, the Soviet regime has tried to separate the United States from
its allies by posing as the defenders of the national sovereignty of America's
allies against the encroachments of "American imperialism."3

The other reasons for which Moscow exploits national sovereignty are 1) to
speed the breaking up of the empires of the West, 2) to keep the new nations
formed from them suspicious of Western offers of help in developing themselves,
and therefore weak and subject to Communist influences, and above all, 3) to
guarantee to the Soviet Union its independence4
until it can become strong enough to destroy the independence of all other
nations, and men. Just as it invokes the democratic rights of free speech, free
press, free assembly to protect its efforts to destroy them, it invokes the
rights of nations to preserve and promote5
its campaign to merge all nations into the faceless, nation-less, single world
sovereignty of the Communist World Dictatorship.

The Communist Concept We Accept -- and Nurse

Nonetheless, of all the false ideas Communism spreads, only its concept of
national sovereignty is widely accepted by Atlanticans in general, and by
Americans most of all. Moscow cannot take credit for this. This concept is a
homegrown fallacy in each Atlantic people. That is one reason why it is so hard
for them to rid themselves of it, and so easy for Communism to exploit it. No
deception is so persuasive and tenacious as self-deception. Evil is most evil,
and hardest to dislodge, when men deem it good.

The current concept of national sovereignty, instead of being recognized by
its democratic victims as cancer, is tenderly nursed and carefully protected by
these people as vital to health. Most of the political doctors they trust to
cure their body politic of the resulting ills seem no wiser. Their remedies are
as wrong as those which physicians prescribed prior to Pasteur. And in their
attitude toward those who do trace these ills to their true source, they also
remind one of the doctors who denounced the French chemist for daring to attack
as false the assumption that underlay their therapy.

True, I find an increasing number of political leaders who now agree, in
private, that the prevailing concept of national sovereignty endangers the free
peoples. Yet most of them still pay lip service to it in public and thus help to
maintain Baal's grip on the hearts of men. Few actively attack it; still fewer,
openly, or head on.

The braver political doctors tell the patient the cancer is a tumor, or just
a little cyst whose removal will involve the sacrifice of no vital organ. Others
say that the only "safe" way to remove it is not to let the people
know what the doctor is doing; their strategy is the "gradualist" one:
They seek to cut the cancer out in a long series of operations, and so little at
a time, that the patient will not realize he is losing what he fondly believes
to be his heart.6 This strategy is safe,
but only for the surgeon.

Among the political leaders who are widely trusted, very few indeed dare to
question, when seeking election to office of trust, the validity of the
prevailing concept of national sovereignty. I can recall no nominee for
President of the United States in my time who has ever denounced this concept as
false to freedom or sought openly to rid the people of it. Nor have any American
Presidents -- with a few truly great (and distant) exceptions ... Washington,
Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln.

This concept is indeed a fearfully difficult fallacy to overcome. That is
one reason why I am devoting so much attention to it now. Another reason is that
there is no other way to cure the ills it causes. From this concept of
sovereignty surges the opposition that has already killed so many moves, however
slight, to advance freedom's law and order between nations, and has nipped in
the bud so many others ... while it goes blindly on producing policies that
advance Communism by further dividing the free. It arms not only those who
oppose Atlantic Union, but those who would protect this or that barrier to
trade, or who defend the Connally amendment against efforts to breathe a little
life into the World Court, or who seek to unite the scientific resources of
Atlantica -- to mention no more.

Hydra-headed, the prevailing concept of national sovereignty guards like
Cerberus the gates of Hell against all attack -- none too minor or too wily to
elude it. But Cerberus was once overcome; Hercules, unarmed, seized and dragged
him up to daylight, by greater strength, applied directly. And to overcome our "monster"
-- as Herculean George Washington dared to call the current concept of
sovereignty -- I find no way as sure as this: Frontal attack with the superior
power of truth.

A final and greater reason to continue this attack is that Washington proved
that by so doing we can hope not only to overcome the monster, but achieve
thereby good beyond measure. We can make the Communist threat no more dangerous
than Nazi-ism is now -- and do this without world war, and much sooner than
seems possible today. We can do far more -- we can create the high civilization
that physical science now puts within the reach of free men, when effectively
united and reinspired by their most vital principles. Fear of catastrophe has
now reduced hope to talk of mere survival. Once we dreamed of the marvelous life
our great grand-children would know. Our own children, and even we ourselves,
can enjoy the advantages and challenges of that life -- if we renounce
our false concept of national sovereignty for the one that is true to freedom's
nature. No struggle is so worthy of another effort. Let us make it now.

____

The three citations are from pages
114, 125 and 471. I warmly recommend this entire volume (published by Columbia
Press in 1960) as a timely and fully documented reminder that Communism has a
thoroughly worked out and never neglected plan for a completely centralized
world government -- the antithesis of Atlantic Federal Union, and the real
alternative to it.

Professor Goodman points out on page
262 of Soviet Design for a World State: "Soviet leaders have
contrived elaborate federalist-appearing devices that have attempted to take
advantage of and to give minimal play to national sentiment not only for the
nations under their control, but also for those nations that they seek to attach
to their self-proclaimed embryo of a world federation. But using the vocabulary
of federalism has never touched the core of their political philosophy, which is
thoroughly centralist, nor would it seem to have altered their ultimate aim of a
unitary world state." This is the conclusion of his Chapter 7, a 73-page
discussion of "The Issue of Centralism versus Federalism in the Leninist
Era."

Ibid, p. 114.

When the United States offered to place
atomic power, of which it then had a monopoly, under international control, Mr.
Gromyko rejected this on March 5, 1947 as an intolerable threat to the "internal
affairs and internal life of states." Replying to Albert Einstein's plea of
Sept. 22, 1947 for "a world society based on law and order," four
distinguished Soviet scientists answered that the Soviet Union was a radical
break from the capitalist system, "and now the proponents of a 'world
super-state' are asking us voluntarily to surrender this independence."
Einstein replied: "You are such passionate opponents of anarchy in the
economic sphere, and yet equally passionate advocates of anarchy, e.g. unlimited
national sovereignty, in the sphere of international politics." This letter
went unanswered. When the United States proposed veto-free international
control, Vyshinsky on Oct. 18, 1954 denounced this as a "world government"
and emphasized that the United Nations "is an assembly of sovereign states
in which the will, interests, desires and views of each must be respected."On
some earlier occasions -- as when Litvinoff sought collective security at the
League of Nations against Hitler -- Moscow has also belittled national
sovereignty but only to preserve itself and thus advance its own scheme for
world government.

Even Moscow's brutal suppression of
the Hungarian revolutionary government was defended by Izvestia on March
9, 1957, as based on the Soviet principle guaranteeing "the strengthening
of the sovereignty of each socialist state."

These are the political doctors who
keep telling us that we must resign ourselves to "thirty years of tension"
such as we have now -- or prepare to live with it even longer, indefinitely.
This is considered "realistic" -- as if we could keep our freedom
healthy by staying in the hospital forever, being treated by defeatists whose
diagnosis is wrong and whose advice is dispiriting.